An accurate velocity estimation algorithm for resource management in next generation wireless systems

Information about a mobile user´s velocity is important for efficient resource management and quality of service (QoS) provisioning in next generation (NG) wireless systems. A mobile receiver´s velocity spreads the received signal envelope in the frequency domain. This spreading is directly proportional to its velocity. A novel algorithm called VEPSD (velocity estimation using the power spectral density of the received signal envelope) is introduced in this paper that uses the amount of Doppler spread in the received signal envelope to estimate the velocity of a mobile user. The Doppler spread is estimated using the slope of the power spectral density (PSD) of the received signal envelope. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated in both Rayleigh and Rician fading environments. The sensitivity of the estimation error to additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), the estimation interval (effect of finite sample size), the sampling period, Rice factor (K), and the angle of arrival of the line of sight (LOS) component is analyzed and compared with the level crossing rate (LCR) and co-variance based velocity estimators. Also, it is shown that the proposed algorithm, VEPSD, can be used for velocity estimation under non-isotropic scattering and frequency selective fading and is well suited for NG wireless systems.